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Gene and Tonic: Five Reasons Your Glowing Plants Haven't Arrived Yet

Submitted by Theral Timpson on Fri, 07/22/2016 - 13:02

Journalist Antonio Regalado over at MIT Tech Review Raised a stink this past week about the failure of The Glowing Plant project. We wanted to share a few of the additional rumors we’ve heard about why the plants won’t glow.

1. Elizabeth Holmes was the lead advisor.

2. The project has been put on hold while the organizers are in M & A talks with Monsanto.

Contributors to the Kickstarter project want some say in the matter, contending that the whole idea was around DIY bio. That’s why they funded it. They don’t want a glowing plant coming from Monsanto.

Project leader, Antony Evans, retorted that if the Kickstarter backers are so keen for DIY bio, then they should go make the plants themselves.

“That’s the very definition of DIY,” he reminded a journalist. “You could say they bought the idea from us to go do it themselves.”

3. All of the project engineers were hired away by Facebook, Google, and Apple.

And then their replacements were hired away by Apple, Google, and Facebook.

4. The plants staged a rebellion.

It was said by an eco-psychic parked out next to the San Francisco based lab that the plants had had enough. Her translation, “What, feeding you, clothing you, wiping your ass, and making you high is not enough? Now we have to glow for you too? Plants, You Can Say No to Humans!”

5. Project leaders are holding out for government support.

There’s talk of a Glowing Plant Moonshot Initiative to be led by Vice President Biden.